ABSTRACT
Accompanying the rise to global hegemony of the nation-state as the political form, the state assumed, under the regimes of capitalism and inter-state competition, more often than not by force of arms, citizenship has become a nearly universal marker of political subjecthood. The Euro/American re-invention in the eighteenth century of an idea that had originated in the city-states of ancient Greece relocated citizenship from the city (or an Empire extending out of a city, as in Rome) in the nation-state, with contradictory consequences. It gave the citizen a say in the organization and functions of the state, opening the promise of democratic government to an ever-widening range of constituencies. It also inaugurated an unprecedented penetration of everyday life by the state, and the expansion of the space of the political, that would culminate in the ascendancy of what Michel Foucault described as ‘biopolitics,’ understood broadly as the regulation of human life and behavior at the everyday level (Foucault 2008). Foucault perceived ‘biopolitics’ as a characteristic of Euromodernity, regardless of the form the state took in different nations in response to particular social and ideological circumstances. We might suggest, likewise, that the contradictory consequences of the remaking of subjects as citizens are equally universal, and have played an important part in shaping the politics of societies worldwide over the last two centuries or so. Varied as paths of nation-building and practices of citizenship may be across regional and national divides, this fundamental contradiction is integral to the variation, rendering the problematic of citizenship universal despite these differences.
